Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to ask Mr. Perreault two questions. My first question concerns your Table 7. You say there are only 2,000 bilingual Canadian government positions in Ontario. Where did you get that statistic? I don't think that's correct. I believe there are 2,000 bilingual persons on Parliament Hill alone.
To say that there are only 2,000 positions in the Government of Canada that require knowledge of both English and French in Ontario, out of the hundreds of thousands of public servants in this province employed by the Government of Canada, doesn't seem to me to be correct. I think there are probably on Parliament Hill alone 2,000 positions that require knowledge of both English and French.
So I don't know where these statistics are coming from.
The second thing I want to say concerns the statistics on Quebec's English-language universities.
My view is that your interpretation of those statistics is not entirely accurate either, in that a very similar situation exists in Nova Scotia. The fact is that in Nova Scotia we have King's College, we have Dalhousie University, we have St. Mary's University, we have Acadia University, we have a number of other universities and colleges in Nova Scotia—disproportionately far more in relation to the population in Nova Scotia, and they disproportionately educate graduates of high schools from the United States and from Ontario, and it's been a long-standing policy of the province to subsidize those students.
The same thing goes on in Quebec with Bishop's, with McGill, with other English universities where they receive a disproportionate number of graduates from the United States and from other Canadian provinces, and therefore the Government of Quebec, in a very similar fashion, has subsidized those universities.
It has nothing to do with the proportion of English-speaking graduates or anglophone graduates from English-speaking high schools in Quebec. It has to do with the fact that there is a disproportionate number of graduates from other provinces and from other countries who are attending those universities.
So I think your view on those statistics isn't entirely correct, and I'd be interested to see in this particular case where these statistics are coming from.